Näringslivskoncentration: Italien och Sverige

"After the war, northern Italian companies created the salotto buono as a line of defence, fearing that Rome to the south lacked a co-ordinated industrial policy and that they needed protection against the long tentacles of organised crime.
But the cross-holdings that were once seen as a vital bulwark against foreign takeovers are now viewed as an Achilles heel. /.../

By the 1980s, Italian capitalism “was a small group that was self-congratulating and self-perpetuating,” says Alan Friedman, author of a seminal book on the power of Gianni Agnelli, the playboy patriarch of the Fiat carmaking dynasty who sat at the centre of Italy’s network of power. “It had become a monopolistic, oligopolistic and definitely unhealthy puppet master of events that kept out any free-market competition from the Milan stock exchange. It was all an inside job.” Agnelli, who was known simply as “L’Avvocato”, the lawyer, had interests ranging far beyond cars. His dominance within Italian corporate life was complemented by Enrico Cuccia, the founder of Mediobanca, Milan’s investment bank par excellence. It was Cuccia who built the cross-holdings that would for so long underpin Italian business. /.../

The pacts orchestrated by Cuccia allowed a few wealthy families – the Agnellis, the Pesentis, the Pirellis, the Ligrestis and later the Benettons – to control Italian finance, industry and media through relatively small stakes. Newly rich families, such as that of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, spent years clambering up to take a seat on Mediobanca’s board. Its power made Mediobanca Italy’s Goldman Sachs. It was the largest shareholder in Italy’s largest insurer, Generali, the biggest telecoms group, Telecom Italia, RCS MediaGroup, owner of Italy’s most influential national newspaper Corriere della Sera, and one of its biggest industrial groups, the tyremaker Pirelli."